About xfl files, Exporting a composition to xfl format – Adobe After Effects CS4 User Manual
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USING AFTER EFFECTS CS4
Rendering and exporting
Last updated 12/21/2009
When you export a composition as an XFL file, After Effects attempts to export individual layers and keyframes,
preserving as much information for direct use in Flash Professional as it can. If After Effects can’t export an element
of a composition as unrendered data in an XFL file, the element is either ignored or rendered into a PNG or FLV item,
depending on whether you choose to ignore unsupported features.
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More Help topics
Working with Flash and After Effects
Basics of rendering and exporting
About XFL files
XFL files are essentially the XML equivalent of FLA files. An XFL file is a compressed archive folder that contains a
Library folder and an XML document (DOMDocument.xml) that describes the FLA file. The Library folder contains
the assets referred to by the XML file. When you open an XFL file in Flash Professional, it extracts these items from
the XFL file and uses them to build a FLA document. You save the document from Flash Professional as a new FLA
file; you do not change the XFL file with Flash Professional.
If you want to examine or manually edit the contents of an XFL file, you can open the compressed archive file in the
same manner as any other .zip file. Changing the filename extension to .zip is not necessary, but it may make
extracting the files for this manual examination more convenient.
Exporting a composition to XFL format
1
To export the selected composition as an XFL file, choose File > Export > Adobe Flash Professional (XFL).
2
In the Adobe Flash Professional (XFL) Settings dialog box, choose what After Effects will do with layers with
unsupported features:
Ignore
Layers with unsupported features are not included in the XFL output.
Rasterize To
Layers with unsupported features are rasterized. This means that the layers are rendered to a bitmap
format (an FLV file or a sequence of PNG images). Vectors are not preserved. This preserves the appearance of the
layer when the XFL file is used in Flash Professional. When rasterizing to a PNG sequence, identical adjacent frames
are rasterized only once, to a single PNG file that is referenced multiple times.
3
(Optional) Click the Format Options button and modify the settings used for creating PNG sequences or FLV files.
If you click Format Options when FLV is chosen in the Format menu, the FLV|F4V (H.264) export settings dialog
box opens. Though you can modify such items as the bit rate, in general you won’t need to change many settings
in this dialog box. Changes that you make in this dialog box persist and are used for subsequent export operations,
so be careful about what you change.
Note: The video format used for XFL export is FLV, not F4V, so the video codecs available in this dialog box are On2
VP6 and Sorenson Spark.
If you make a change to the format options that you would like to undo, click the Reset To Defaults button in the
Adobe Flash Professional (XFL) Settings dialog box.
4
In the Export As Adobe Flash Professional (XFL) dialog box, choose a location for the output files.
As the composition is being processed, a dialog box shows the progress of the export operation.